[[Siri-Hustvedt]]Siri Hustvedt is renowned for her elegant, cerebral novels and darkly bewitching storytelling (particularly the psychological thriller What I Loved). Her latest novel contains all hertrademark elements, though she sheds her recent male narrators to feature a cross-generational, deliberately all-female cast of characters, in what appears a nod to the classic 1939 film The Women. And from its epigraph – a snatch of dialogue between Cary Grant and Irene Dunne, to its last words (‘FADE TO BLACK’), this story is steeped in homage to the whip-smart ‘battle of the sexes’ comedies of the 1930s.

When Mia’s brilliant but inept neuroscientist husband asks for a ‘pause’ in their 30-year marriage so he can pursue an attraction to a colleague, she literally goes mad. Following brief incarceration in an asylum, she flees to spend the summer in her native Minnesota, renting a house near her ageing mother and teaching a poetry course to pubescent girls. She befriends her back-fence neighbours – twentysomething Lola and her feisty four-year-old, Flora – and her mother’s group of ‘formidable’ widower friends, nicknamed ‘the Five Swans’.

Hustvedt deftly, inventively explores how these characters’ experiences reflect universal truths for contemporary women. Mia is enriched by the relationships with the women around her (particularly her mother), but also observes how women can injure each other, as her class of new adolescents descend into ‘an invisible undertow’ of too-familiar bully- ing and ostracism. She wonders, ‘If girls banged each other over the head instead of plotting nasty little games of sabotage, would they suffer less?’

This subversion of niceness is central to the novel, along with the different ways suppressed anger, rebellion and competitiveness – all considered by science to be ‘male’ traits (as Mia brilliantly, sarcastically outlines) – can emerge. For instance, one of the Swans finds release in embroidering ‘secret amusements’ – craftworks seemingly ‘Happy-Wappy’ but secretly layered with ‘little scenes within scenes’, such as women masturbating,or flying naked. The conventions of art, and of storytelling itself, are on show here. On many levels, she looks at the way we create the stories of our own lives – the way that shifting perspectives alter the story, the difficulty of arriving at a shared ‘truth’ – as well as the way we read stories.

At the novel’s heart, though, is a complex romance, a story that ‘begins deep in marriage, after years of sex and talk and fights’. It’s deeply imperfect – and deeply unfashionable. Mia’s fierce connection to Boris, she admits, is made of both good aspects and bad – but, most binding and irresistible of all, is the story they have written together. Hustvedt writes that the difference between comedy and tragedy is in the structure. ‘A comedy depends on stopping the moment at exactly the right moment.’ I won’t give away the ending, but I will say that it stops at just the right moment, in just the right way.

Jo Case is editor of Readings Monthly.